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On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Panitch talks about how the Labour Party moved from being a Tony Blair party of class reconciliation and war, to a truly left mass party with more than 600,000 members that may take power Continue reading this...

A pamphlet titled: “ALTERNATIVE MODELS OF OWNERSHIP. REPORT TO THE SHADOW CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER AND SHADOW SECRETARY OF STATE FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY AND INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY” was recently issued in the name of the Labour Party. It was a discussion document intended to inform and influence the policy proposals to be tabled at the Labour Party Conference later this year. It was discussed at a meeting held in London on the 10th February.

Have you noticed that it’s no longer PC Dixon of Dock Green who mediates the relationship between the state and its citizens as he goes about his beat in your neighbourhood? Instead, it’s a Kevlar-armoured, video-monitored, taser-equipped, drone-surveilled, spit-masked supplied soldier, straight out of Star Wars, who now staggers along under the weight of an industrialized capitalism, visibly physically disconnected from the citizens they monitor by their bullet-proof uniforms, that more resemble a rack of tools in your local hardware store than the Bobby on the beat.

It’s interesting reading comments on the essays I write that get published around the world on various websites (at least those that permit comments) regarding Jeremy Corbyn.

What appears to generate the most ire are my views on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as the alleged vehicle for radical, social transformation. It seems the man can do no wrong. He appears to have achieved some kind of saintly status amongst those on the left and amongst progressives in general, let alone the millions who voted for him. So is it any wonder that my decidedly unfashionable views provoke such negative reactions?

The fight between pro-Corbyn and anti-Corbyn forces within the UK’s Labour Party is intensifying as the anti-Corbyn camp attempts to stop Corbyn supporters from being on the ballot. Prof. Leo Panitch of York University explains (inc. transcript) Continue reading this...

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Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance. The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.

It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is now led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different and is rare in British establishment politics.

Consider the Grenfell Tower inferno as an expression of a new kind of class war, but not a class war as we have known it–between organised workers, political parties and capital–but between ordinary citizens and the local fiefdoms of the capitalist state as increasingly, big business has taken over the running of what’s left of our public and collective life, through ‘outsourcing’, public-private-partnerships and what have you, where making a profit is the bottom line, not serving the public.[1]

[I have to throw in my two-pennyworth here; I am still not convinced that Corbyn can so transform the Labour Party as to effectively make a new political formation out of it, that will, in turn lead us out of this nightmare toward real socialism. We’ll see. WB]

‘There are three stages’, Sidney Webb wrote in a Fabian Society pamphlet in 1890, ‘through which every new notion in England has to pass: ‘It is impossible: It is against the Bible: We knew it before’.’[1] This month’s sensational election result means that Corbynism is now rocketing toward the latter stage, consolidating its position as the new common sense on the left of British politics. Granted, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour didn’t win. Outright victory on 8 June was never likely given the party’s weak prior standing, and would have required a seismic shift far greater than could reasonably be expected in a landscape fractured and divided by Brexit. Nevertheless, what Corbyn and his team pulled off – against all odds, and in the teeth of an overwhelmingly hostile media and continual sabotage from within – is truly remarkable. The Labour Party is now a government-in-waiting, poised for the next General Election, which could come at any time and could easily carry Corbyn into Downing Street as Prime Minister.

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The personal attack on Corbyn by the media was premeditated. If they could not destroy the message, then one of the cardinal rules of propaganda, is to then discredit the messenger. The capitalist class was aware that Corbyn’s message of hope and of an alternative to austerity, would be popular. The capitalists fear raising of the aspirations of the masses like no other, because if it breaks the political inertia paralysing the working class and once it sets workers in motion, they become more difficult to manage. May, as Home Secretary, knew that disaffection was rising. That is why the Tories originally fought the campaign on Presidential issues rather than bread and butter issues. It failed. Continue reading this...

“From nowhere, a grassroots power base of [60,000] left-wing activists overturned Blair’s 20-year “New Labour” project, which took the party into the Clintonite center ground, and ultimately to three straight general election victories, No.10 Downing Street, and government. As the leader of Britain’s main opposition, Corbyn is technically the next prime minister in waiting. This is not a trivial achievement.